How Heart iQ Can Save & Upgrade Your Relationship

In Heart IQ, we work with both men and women to heal your wounds, traumas and neglect, together in community. From this place of wholeness, you are given communication skills to practice asking for your needs to be met and how to navigate disappointment and conflict - from the Heart. With this powerful foundation of healing and heart centered communication, you are then invited to stretch into a more expansive emotional-energetic range of your inner sacred masculine and feminine gifts so that you can consciously create powerful and potent polarity with others and use your sexual connection as a gateway to deeper connection.

On this page, you'll learn the deeper concepts behind our relationship model, as Christian Pankhurst, Founder of Heart IQ, takes you on a journey of what it takes to create a Heart IQ Relationship. If you are in a relationship or feel finally ready to attract a partner who can meet you, then we invite you to join us at an upcoming Relationship & Sexuality week at New Eden, as part of the Awakened Living Project.

Heart iQ Relationships & Sexuality Week

March 4th - 10th, 2019

A 20-hour workshop that brings the clarity and power of Heart Intelligence into your Intimate Relationships.

Most relationships begin with a lot of potential, but the real challenge is how do you continue to deepen your connection with one another amidst the tests of daily life? This Intimacy Training is an invitation to explore the unknown regions of your potential alongside other men and women who are facing the same dilemma.

Over 5 days (Monday - Friday) you'll be guided through interactive exercises and group discussions as you practice new skills for building intimacy and resolving conflict. You’ll learn to transform your relationship with heart-centered communication and embodiment practices that will create a huge impact on your emotional, energetic and physical intimacy.

Led by Christian Pankhurst, you’ll be shown how to recognise the seven key ingredients for creating a juicy, lasting relationship that will give you a brand new foundation upon which to build or rebuild your passion, excitement and longing for one another. You’ll get to see where you’ve learned to settle for less and receive the guidance you need to reset your expectations to match the unrestricted intimacy you’ve always wanted to have with your partner!

In this event, the group environment is enormously supportive in creating a greater sense of safety for you to explore your relationship. You’ll be witnessed in a loving community of others who can understand your trials and are there to support you in confronting your intimacy challenges with new insight. With each day, you’ll learn to trust each other in deeper ways as your defenses come down, conflicts soften and often resolve, and your hearts open again to one another.

NOTE: This event focuses on couples, as well as those who are in a relationship but attending without their partner, but singles who are exploring their readiness to claim more of what they want in their next relationship are welcome too!

Part 1: The Healing Journey Couples Must Take Together

In this video, watch, as Christian shares the root of all relationship dysfunction and why it's critical we must first become aware of the relationship dynamics that are playing out our childhood wounds.

Register For The Deep Dive Intimacy Retreat February 12th - 18th 2017Hosted At The Heart IQ Center, The Netherlands

Development of Relationship Dysfunction: A Model

Inspired by the work of Dr Charlotte Kasl, PhD here's a model that does a great job in explaining why relationships bring up so much pain and why they will often fail without proper guidance and support.

Relationship dysfunction proceeds through the following stages:

Victimization

Development of Core Beliefs

Cultural, family and genetic filter

Beliefs to reduce anxiety

Operational beliefs

Addiction and Co-dependency

Stage 1: Victimization

Victimization involves any form of neglect, abuse or betrayal that leave's a child's basic needs unmet or that violates the child's body, mind or spirit. It can be wilful abuse or the result from ignorance, death, accidents, war, catastrophe, early hospitalisation, or isolation. While all parents make mistakes, victimization involves a parent's continued inability to understand and respond to the emotional and physical needs of you as a child, as well as overt abuse in some cases. Over time, victimization and neglect leave a basic emptiness, an unmet longing or hunger that becomes the driving force forunderlying addictions.

Stage 2: The Development of Core Beliefs

As a child who was abused, neglected, or abandoned, you develop feelings of terror anger and sadness. You fear you will die. When no one responds to your feelings, you assume they must be bad. Unable to separate your feelings from your identity, you translate "My feelings are bad" to "I am bad". Eventually you become a "shame-based" person, meaning that you feel defective at your core. Your core beliefs about yourself are negative, and your script in life will be written based on these beliefs. You may go through life believing yourself guilty of a nameless crime, which you deserve to be punished. Because your emotional and physical needs are not met in childhood, even if your parents were physically present, you believe that you will always be abandoned.

The negative core beliefs most often articulated are:

I am defective. I am shameful. There's something wrong with me.

I'll never be loved for myself.

I am powerless over my life

I am unwanted

I will always be abandoned. I will always be alone.

My body is damaged/defective/shameful.

Messages about a child's worth are conveyed in a multitude of ways, beginning in the womb. A mother's stress, nutrition and chemical use all affect an unborn infant. If a woman experiences physical or sexual abuse during pregnancy, it will resonate in the child. A parent who is uncomfortable holding her baby, disgusted when the baby drools, messes a diaper, or explores her genitals, communicate those feelings to the infant. The child develops a nameless feeling that he or she is bad. The child begins to experience his/her body as shameful, even though his/her parents may never have said anything negative.

Stage 3: Cultural, family, and genetic filter

A child whose vulnerability has been betrayed is desperate for a way to relieve the tremendous pain of victimisation and devise a means of control. That the child will adopt some kind of survival skills is a given. The exact nature of these skills is influenced by family and experiences, innate temperament, chance events, education, and cultural messages that are influenced by class, ethnic background, religion, education, and the media.

When you stumble onto a behaviour or standard that relieves pain or gives power, chances are you will adopt it. You may try to be cute, competent, smart, athletic or you may adopt the role of troublemaker, or loser, hoping to stop your parents from hurting you and to get their attention.

Stage 4: Beliefs to reduce anxiety

Negative core beliefs create internal devastation and hopelessness along with a tremendous fear, anxiety, and depression. They give you no sense of how to be loved or how to survive. They have no payoff. To escape them, you put your survival instincts to work to find a way to reduce the anxiety and pain. The goal is to stop being vulnerable to the parents or caregivers. The beliefs you adopt to reduce anxiety will be fundamental in whether you move toward a primary role of sexual codependent or sex addict. The anxiety reducing beliefs most likely to lead to an addictive modus operandi include: I don't need anyone; I don't care about these people; I'm tough; I can do it myself. It is far less painful to believe that you don't need someone than to have your longing for love and care constantly denied.

The woman headed for codependency is more likely to say, just as in the fairytales, "If I am good enough, some day my prince will come to take care of me." The essential difference between the two parts is that the potential addict denies his/her neediness and seeks power while the potential codependent denies his/her anger and searches for security.

Of course, the child does not deliberately choose these beliefs; they are formed at all levels of consciousness. The beliefs feel like the truth, and they keep the devastating pain of victimisation at bay.

Your need, like an underground stream is ready to spring up whenever there is an opening. The anxiety-reducing statement "I will find someone to take care of me" also creates an internal tension, for it takes the search outside of yourself causing you to lose control over your life.

Stage 5: Operational beliefs

Operational beliefs are created by transforming core beliefs into a course of action. Developed over a long period of trial and error, operational beliefs lead to actions that will provide illusory escapes from the dreaded feelings associated with core beliefs. The goal is to feel wanted, powerful, attractive, and lovable, or, for the codependent, secure.

In order to achieve these goals, the child transforms the core belief by adding a conditional clause that provides a course of action. For example, "I am powerless" becomes "I am powerful when I seduce someone, someone is hopelessly in love with me, I'm sexual," and so forth. For the codependent, who seeks security, the core belief "I am powerless over my life" becomes "I'll find security in a partner." These operational beliefs become important survival tools. They create pathways out of despair.

Once you click into action sponsored by an operational belief, you will feel more like a survivor and less like a victim; You now have a behavioural recipe for survival. Paradoxically, this recipe may eventually lead to devastation for it is almost always a faulty foundation for living.

When you put your operational beliefs into action, they become your reality and your painful core beliefs are increasingly forgotten and repressed. Painful childhood memories are relegated to the unconscious or kept at bay. You might even say, "Oh, I had a wonderful childhood," or "It wasn't so bad," or "Underneath it all I know my parents love me. They did the best they could." The pain associated with the core beliefs is triggered only when life brings disappointment, rejection, or loneliness.

That's where addiction and codependency enter. When the pain associated with the core beliefs is triggered, you'll use your operational tactics to fend off the feared feelings. Thus, the panic response to rejection, hurt, and disappointment can be stopped with the addictive or codependent behaviour. Upset and lonely? Seduce someone. Your lover rejects you? Sleep with his or her best friend. Feeling neglected? Get sympathy by telling someone what a jerk and asexual bore your partner is. Feeling powerless? Make a subtle dig at your partner about his/her sexual in adequacies and watching him/her blowup or feel hurt. Feeling empty? We re-decorate your house and buy new clothes.

Part 2: Effective Communication Is The Key

In this video, Christian describes the importance of learning the skills of heart centered communication to get our needs met. Additionally, he stresses the importance of having a strong brotherhood and sisterhood to ensure that we don't transfer needs to our partner that really should be met by our brothers and sisters.

Register For The Deep Dive Intimacy Retreat February 12th - 18th 2017Hosted At The Heart IQ Center, The Netherlands

"This young man, Christian Pankhurst, can articulate these messages as well as, if not better, than I can. He is a profound source of inspiration and wisdom"

Neale Donald WalschNew York Times Best Selling Author of Conversations with God

"This saved our marriage!"

Nico and Petra

"We wouldn't have survived without this"

Christina & Simon

Part 3: Increasing Polarity & Sexual Magnetism

With a foundation of good communication, boundaries and awareness of how your childhood trauma's play out in your relationship, the next step is to work on increasing your polarity and sexual magnetism. In this video Christian shares about this critical ingredient for relationships to thrive.

Register For The Deep Dive Intimacy Retreat February 12th - 18th 2017Hosted At The Heart IQ Center, The Netherlands